SHAFAQNA – This list is in no way exhaustive, but is every part disgusting.

With Islamophobia on the rise, every other day we hear stories of Muslim passengers being exited from flights for one reason or the other. Here’s a list of bizarre reasons, airlines asked their Muslim customers to get off the plane.

Asking For Coke

In a recent incident Tahera Ahmed , a chaplain at Chicago’s Northwestern University asked for an unopened can of Coke for hygiene reasons aboard a United airlines plane. Whilst the air-hostess refused serving her the unopened soft drink, a passenger next to her was promptly given a sealed bottle of beer. Ahmed was further insulted when the attendant told her she was not given the coke since she might use the can as a weapon.

Biggest threat to the country right now: A lone woman, using a can of coke to terrorize America and hijack planes.

Doing Mathematics

A hostility towards Math is entirely understandable. It is a hatred that is birthed sometime in high school, and unites people all around the world.

An Ivy League professor of economics was recently the victim of misplaced hate. The passenger sitting next to him took the indecipherable math equations he was working on to be cryptic messages written in Arabic. Professor Menzio was taken off the plane, questioned, and had to produce his Math work (amidst laughter) to assuage the security officers’ concern.

The only thing more abhorrent than the unjustified hate is the overwhelming ignorance of the passenger, both towards Math and the Arabic script.

Sweating

A passenger who sweats is possibly the worst flying nightmare for many. But this is no reason to just haul him off a flight. Plane journeys wear the best of us down, people have to rush from one spot to another, and it is completely okay if a trickle or two run down your forehead.

But in this case, since the passengers were Muslim, sweating apparently became something completely impermissible. Returning from a holiday in Paris, Faisal Ali and Nazia Ali were kicked off a Delta plane for sweating, and saying the word “Allah”. As the custom officer talking to Faisal and Nazia so aptly put it, “this is the world we live in right now.”

Sharing Your Name With Someone Else

Six-year-old Syed Adam Ahmed instills terror in the hearts of airport authorities and has been repeatedly banned from boarding flights in the past. Although the Canadian boy’s family has been promised that his name will be removed from the list of people barred from flying, the boy was stopped as recently as March. The family believes it might be because Adam shares his name with a high-profile terror suspect.

Switching Seats

Okay, you know, it actually IS annoying when your neighbor on a plane pesters you to switch seats. Although a regular passenger would have only received a side-eye, a Somali woman was kicked out, possibly because she had donned a headscarf. No other explanation was given, apart from that that the flight attendant felt uncomfortable.

Looking Muslim

Well, this one is a winner. You may have been sitting, sleeping, sweating, talking, but the one thing to make air travel a real pain for you is your Muslim identity. The open-minded, tolerant Western society may be open to homophobia, Islamophobia and racism under the guise of freedom of speech, but it certainly has no place for people who CHOOSE to look Muslim.

There are many, many other cases we could cite here, but one common thread runs through each of them, the victims’ Muslim identity. So Muslims, if you ever want to board a plane, make sure you obliterate all signs of your identity. Happy flying!